Thinking, Fast and Slow

(Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 and a Best Book of 2011 for the New York Times Book Review, Globe and Mail, and Economist) This brilliant, lucid, and entertaining book by Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman continues his exploration of judgment and decision-making. We think in two ways at once, as he explains—System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and emotional; and the slower, more deliberative, more logical System 2—and the systems are not always in harmony. Looking at the impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, and the effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning a vacation, Kahneman explains how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

"There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece.... This is one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read."—Financial Times (London)

"It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahneman's contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He stands among the giants, a weaver of the threads of Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Sigmund Freud. Arguably the most important psychologist in history, Kahneman has reshaped cognitive psychology, the analysis of rationality and reason, the understanding of risk and the study of happiness and well-being.... [This is] a magisterial work, stunning in its ambition, infused with knowledge, laced with wisdom, informed by modesty and deeply humane. If you can read only one book this year, read this one."—Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching.... By the time I got to the end of Thinking, Fast and Slow, my skeptical frown had long since given way to a grin of intellectual satisfaction. Appraising the book by the peak-end rule, I overconfidently urge everyone to buy and read it. But for those who are merely interested in Kahenman's takeaway on the Malcolm Gladwell question it is this: If you've had 10,000 hours of training in a predictable, rapid-feedback environment—chess, firefighting, anesthesiology—then blink. In all other cases, think."—NYTBR

"Absorbingly articulate and infinitely intelligent.... What's most enjoyable and compelling about Thinking, Fast and Slow is that it's so utterly, refreshingly anti-Gladwellian. There is nothing pop about Kahneman's psychology, no formulaic story arc, no beating you over the head with an artificial, buzzword-encrusted Big Idea. It's just the wisdom that comes from five decades of honest, rigorous scientific work, delivered humbly yet brilliantly, in a way that will forever change the way you think about thinking."—The Atlantic